Bio

This is Paul Quarrington’s Comprehensive Biography Page covering all types of his art.

Novelist Paul Quarrington is also a musician, most recently in the band Porkbelly Futures, an award-winning screenwriter and an acclaimed non-fiction writer. His last novel, Galveston, was nominated for the Giller; Whale Music won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction in 1989. Quarrington has also won the Stephen Leacock Medal for King Leary.

Personal

Paul Lewis Quarrington was born July 22, 1953, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He was the second son of Bruce Joseph (a psychologist and a pioneer programmer of computers) and Mary Ormiston (maiden name, Lewis - also a psychologist). Quarrington has two children Carson Lara, and Flannery. He lives in the city of Toronto, although he grew up during his teen years in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills. He attended the University of Toronto, from 1970 to 1972.

Career

Musician (from earliest days) playing guitar, clarinet, squeeze box, bass, harp, and piano. Composer writing alone and with others producing a number one single in Canada (1980 - Baby and the Blues) with Martin Worthy; toured and recorded with Canadian and famously notorious Joe Hall and The Continental Drift. Currently playing with Porkbelly Futures.

Awards, Honours

• Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters, most promising new writer in 1986;
• Periodical Distributors of Canada Authors Award;
• Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1987 for King Leary;
• Finalist for Trillium Book Award for King Leary in 1987;
• HYPERLINK “http://www.canadacouncil.ca/prizes/ggla/default.asp” Governor General’s Literary Award for English Language Fiction in Canada in 1989 for Whale Music;
• Genie Award for best screenplay for Perfectly Normal;
• Genie Award for best song - Claire (from the movie Whale Music);
• nominated for Gemini Award for Best Writing In A Dramatic Series - Due South - All the Queen’s Horses with Paul Gross, and John Krizanc;
• Short Listed For Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1998 for The Boy On The Back Of The Turtle
• Short Listed for Trillium Book Award in1998 for The Boy On The Back Of The Turtle
• The Writers Guild of Canada’s Annual Top Ten Award in 2000 for “Manipulation” an episode of the television series Power Play.
• Galveston nominated for The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2004;
• Winner of Canada Reads 2008, for King Leary, defended by Dave Bidini 2008.

Background
Paul Quarrington is a deceptively quiet man who has achieved success and acclaim in many of the arts. He claims that much of what he is today is perhaps attributed to his parents both being psychologists. Quarrington’s earliest artistic efforts were in music. The guitar was his entry into the world of the blues. He quickly became accomplished on the instrument, performing for audiences around his school and later the Toronto coffee houses and pubs. Both of his brothers are still professional musicians, although in different branches of the field. (His older brother, Tony is a very gifted guitarist performing primarily in the jazz scene around his hometown of Toronto. Joel, the youngest brother, achieved a lifetime dream by becoming the principal bassist with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra — a post he has already held for many years.

MUSIC
Blues, folk, rock and country music have all played important roles in Quarrington’s life. He started out playing the “blues” and he always has a bit of the genre in his work. He had a successful introduction into the music business with his first professional partner and friend - Canadian writer Dan Hill. Later he would form a lasting association with Martin Worthy that would produce a Quarrington/Worthy album, a separate album of Quarrin

WRITING

for which he received the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 1987. New York Times Book Review contributor Ron Carlson observed that “what starts out to be the life story of the King of Ice changes into something more like a mystery.” Quarrington begins “tormenting King Leary with memory,” wrote Carlson, and “as the layers of memory peel away, Leary is wide-eyed at what he finds his life has been, and he moves toward atonement.”

Whale Music followed Logan in Overtime, another hockey setting fit to paint Quarrington’s picture of life on the dreary side of success. But, in Whale Music Quarrington plays a trick. The protagonist, Desmond Howell, is a reclusive overweight, aging mega-successful rock star, bearing some resemblance to the Beach Boy’s Brian Wilson. The novel won Quarrington a Governor’s General Award for fiction, and was made into a successful, motion picture.

Civilization (about film making early in Hollywood’s history) and The Boy on the Back of the Turtle (non-fiction account of a trip to the Galápagos Islands with his father and his young daughter), were released to great media fanfare and fan delight.

The Spirit Cabinet, was released in 1999 and immediately received high praise from the literary press. This could be Quarrington’s best book ever. There has been a bit of a back-lash from the magician’s camp because there is a feeling that he “gave away” the secrets to magical illusions. However, the few secrets that he may have offered are mixed with the secrets of fictional proportions and flights of the imagination. Magic is still safe.

2004 saw the publication of Galveston, a book he descibes as “being about the weather.” In the Globe & Mail, F. Rigelhof expands on this by saying, “Buy Galveston right now, but save it for a rainy day — a really rainy day. Paul Quarrington’s ninth novel is a terrific, brilliant, near-perfect piece of vacation reading for that inevitable low in every holiday when black clouds gather, the sky turns to thunder, plans fall apart and a paper world is preferable to the real one. Galveston will keep you engrossed page by page until daylight fades, the power goes out or a bottle of wine gets the better of you. Then, at the end, you’ll be swept away imagining its survivors doing what the last sentence says they do as they “rode these rafts upon the waves until they came to the shore of a small island where the natives, naked and smiling, greeted them with gifts.”

In 2008, his novel The Ravine was published by Random House Canada.

The word sport must has special meaning to Paul Quarrington. His writings have revolved around sports of many genres. He has written about sports in both his fictional and non-fiction works.
He has never been a great athlete although he is a great sportsman. He has tried his hand at hockey - stealing pond time under the shadows with midnight skating on lonely downtown rinks surrounded only by friends and would-be teachers. Weight lifting is something that he has done well at, as well and long distance running. He has completed several marathon races and continues to run daily from his home. Regardless of the weather, he puts in his daily miles. While he will never become a professional athlete, he knows what it takes to be one.
Of his fictional work, Home Game is about baseball; King Leary and Logan In Overtime are about hockey; and Life Of Hope is based on fishing. His non-fiction works are also centered on sports. Hometown Heroes is a set of tales of his personal accounts with the real-life hockey players who represented their country by playing for Canada’s National Hockey Team. Fishing With My Old Guy proclaims Quarrington’s love of fishing. And he returns to the hockey set again with Original Six where he lovingly edits six stories by several well known writers based on the special hockey era that preceded the 1967 NHL expansion.

Films
Paul Quarrington is a famous graduate of the Canadian Film Centre located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The Centre was created to develop Canadian talent in Canada. Quarrington has written several screenplays and stage plays drawing upon the skills that the Centre nurtured. Most notable are: Camilla, Whale Music, Giant Steps and Perfectly Normal, the latter becoming a huge underground cult film around universities and colleges. He has wrote and/or directed several short films, and will do so again with the BookShort titled “Pavane” which will be based on his novel The Ravine (2008).
Television
Not to miss out on this literary media, Quarrington continues to use the skills and techniques learned while in attendance at the Canadian Film Centre writing and supervising teleplays for three series. He has been a frequent writer for “the mountie show” — Due South that has aired for many seasons in Canada, the US, the UK, Germany, Australia and many other countries around the world. Likewise, his writing for John Woo’s Once A Thief has provided television viewers hours of fun in Canada, Germany, France, Austria and Spain. In 1998, he took his love of sport and hockey in particular, to the small screen as Executive Story Editor for the CTV Series Power Play. Set in Hamilton, his writing the history of the Steelheads Hockey Club has offered him a vehicle worthy of his imagination. He story edited Moose TV for Showcase, which won the CFTPA Indie Award for best comedy serie 2008.
Painting
Dabbling in the graphic arts, Quarrington has created several wonderful paintings over the years that are certain to be gracing the walls of lucky people all over the country.
Activities
Quarrington is actively involved with several groups and issues. Currently he is:

• Board Member of Fringe Theatre Toronto.
• Festival Programmer for BookShorts’ Moving Stories Film Festival
• a frequent guest of Harbourfront Reading Series in Toronto.
• the past Chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada in 1996
• a past Board Member of PEN Canada
• a committed bachelor